Ten Miles Past Normal

Ten Miles Past NormalTen Miles Past Normal
by Frances O’Roark Dowell

“Funny, wise, and artfully realistic” -National Public Radio

Description
Janie Gorman wants to be normal. The problem with that: she’s not. She’s smart and creative and a little bit funky. She’s also an unwilling player in her parents’ modern-hippy, let’s-live-on-a-goat-farm experiment (regretfully, instigated by a younger, much more enthusiastic Janie). This, to put it simply, is not helping Janie reach that “normal target.” She has to milk goats every day…and endure her mother’s pseudo celebrity in the homemade-life, crunchy mom blogosphere. Goodbye the days of frozen lasagna and suburban living, hello crazy long bus ride to high school and total isolation–and hovering embarrassments of all kinds. The fresh baked bread is good…the threat of homemade jeans, not so much.

It would be nice to go back to that old suburban life…or some grown up, high school version of it, complete with nice, normal boyfriends who wear crew neck sweaters and like social studies. So, what’s wrong with normal? Well, kind of everything. She knows that, of course, why else would she learn bass and join Jam Band, how else would she know to idolize infamous wild-child and high school senior Emma (her best friend Sarah’s older sister), why else would she get arrested while doing a school project on a local freedom school (jail was not part of the assignment). And, why else would she kind of be falling in “like” with a boy named Monster—yes, that is his real name. Janie was going for normal, but she missed her mark by about ten miles…and we mean that as a compliment.

Frances O’Roark Dowell’s fierce humor and keen eye make her YA debut literary and wise. In the spirit of John Green and E. Lockhart, Dowell’s relatable, quirky characters and clever, fluid writing prove that growing up gets complicated…and normal is WAY overrated. Read Ten Miles Past Normal by Frances O’Roark Dowell.

News, Awards & Nominations

  • Ten Miles Past Normal will be released in Trade Paperback on May 22, 2012.
  • Ten Miles Past Normal — Nominated: 2012 Capitol Choices Noteworthy Books for Children and Teens
  • Ten Miles Past Normal — Named: ALA’s YALSA 2012 Best Fiction for Young Adults List

Reviews of Ten Miles Past Normal

  • The Horn Book
    Dowell gets all the details of ninth grade right: the changing relationships with friends; the allure and disappointment of the forbidden boy; embarrassing parents; and how having a passion changes everything. The secondary characters are kids you would like to hang out with, especially Monster, the oversized, loving friend who is just too old to be Janie’s boyfriend, and Sarah’s cool, nonconformist sister Emma. Middle schoolers with an eye to the future will love imagining themselves into Janie’s world.
  • National Public Radio
    Funny, wise, and artfully realistic, Dowell offers the upside of abandoning normal, embracing your own weirdness and barreling on with life.
  • Kirkus
    A quirky coming-of-age for girls ready to discover their cool aunt’s stash of vintage copies of Sassy. In her first months of high school, Janie Gorman is discovering the unfortunate, not at all subtle differences between offbeat and off-putting as the daughter of a rather dilettantish farming family. Sure, she sews her own up-cycled clothes, creating skirts “made out of an old pair of jeans and some killer fabric scraps,” and embraces milking the farm’s goats, Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette and Patsy Cline. But to catch the bus on time, Janie occasionally forgets to remove the hay from her hair or scrape the goat dung from her shoes, and it’s getting her noticed, in a feeling-forced-to-hide-in-the-library-during-lunch kind of way. Encouraged by the sweet, thoughtful and utterly misnamed Monster Monroe to “live large” and embrace her whole, idiosyncratic self, Janie and her best friend, straight-laced and super-academic Sarah, go all-in. They hurl themselves into a project highlighting local heroes of the Civil Rights Era, learn to play bass and accordion and outgrow a hopeless shared crush on hunky jerk Jeremy Fitch. That’s a lot of ground to cover, and the plot occasionally teeters under the weight of its many developments and down-home secondary characters, but Janie’s voice–anxious, funny and winning holds it all together as she finds and takes her place at school and on the farm.
  • School Library Journal
    Dowell brings a completely refreshing take on the coming-of-age novel. Janie is not suffering through anything harsher than trying to find her place in high school. That can be difficult enough, as the author seems to know. Janie is realistic, smart, crabby, emotional, loving to her family, not overly dramatic. Dowell’s writing is smart, lithe, and cheerful. The plot covers only a few weeks’ time, and the story flies along. It’s about making friends, keeping friends, trying to broaden horizons, meeting boys, seeing idols from a different perspective, and staying true to oneself without feeling lost in a big school. Throw in an interesting subplot about civil-rights history and you’ve got a rich book that will resonate with young teens who may not see themselves in other, darker, YA literature.–Geri Diorio, The Ridgefield Library, CT
  • BookPage
    Although Frances O’Roark Dowell is a best-selling and highly acclaimed author of novels for young readers, Ten Miles Past Normal is her first novel for teens. She lives up to her acclaim in this unusual coming-of-age story about a 14-year-old girl who is far from normal, but very endearing.